Notes for Right Now: In Defense of Facebook?
Strange that I would feel motivated to compose a defense of Facebook, of all things, n precisely this moment – strange for at least a couple of different reasons. Strange, first of all, because I have not seen, nor do I plan to see, The Social Network, the much-ballyhooed new movie about Facebook’s founding father, Mark Zuckerberg (ex-CNN talking head Rick Sanchez would likely point out, at this point, that with a last name like that, the guy’s almost certainly a Jew). Not just because the movie seems perhaps a bit too timely to strike me as worthy of critical attention, but also owing to more personal matters. Zuckerberg, billionaire at the precocious age of twenty-six, with his signature jeans and t-shirt (or sweatshirt when its chilly) non-outfits that some in the fashion world have declared the epitome of the new banker chic – the look that goes with access to and control over the movements of large quantities of capital – and his penchant for computer programming, reminds me of my cousin Andrew. Like Zuckerberg, Andrew spent his time in college less on schoolwork (I think he was a psych. major, but I’d have to double check that) than on partying with friends and, more importantly, fiddling about with computers. Like Zuckerberg, Andrew signifies to the world the – from my perspective – enormous quantity of money to which his person corresponds not by wearing expensive, designer clothes but, precisely, by not wearing expensive, designer clothes, and instead wearing whatever the fuck he wants (and nothing says “I’m wearing whatever the fuck I want” like jeans and a t-shirt). As for the money itself, the precise figures are, naturally, a carefully guarded family secret. But a secret is not carefully guarded unless it is also meant – at least desired – to be shared, and so it goes with this one. A few years back, when Andrew sold a software company he had built to Microsoft, fourteen million was the number that circulated throughout the family in hushed tones. And even though I know that from many perspectives fourteen million dollars does not have all that much in common with, say, Zuckerberg’s billion, from my perspective they represent essentially the same quantity: infinite.
The situation is not, I want to say, that I resent my cousin his financial success – at the very least, I don’t want to, I try not to. When I see him I hug him and look him in the eyes, and I do my best to admire him for things that have nothing to do with money: his dedication to his two young children, for example. But what you have to understand is, Andrew is one year older than I am, and while I was surviving my decidedly middle class (my parents were employees of the public school system) Midwestern upbringing, he was enjoying an indisputably more affluent and seemingly more cosmopolitan childhood in Long Island (now, of course, his family’s Long Island neighborhood reappears to me as something of a backwater, and his upbringing in fact less cosmopolitan than mine, which involved frequent bouts of national and international travel; but this is now and that was then and it is then, naturally, that haunts me now). Which is to say that, as a child, I looked up to Andrew, looked up to him almost desperately; that, therefore, when I was still a child, Andrew was established in the deep recesses of my psyche as the standard, or at least one of the crucial standards, against which I would be destined to measure myself in life. Success would mean, in one way or another, to measure up to Andrew. As for failure?
Now, still one year younger than he is, but a handful of years older than he was when he made his first fortune, this is what I do: I write, I read, I study. I live not on savings, not even on a salary, but rather on what might be described as funding. I count out my existence in the hundreds. How could I possibly even begin to measure myself against, no less measure up to, fourteen million, or even one? So though I don’t, or try not to, resent my cousin Andrew his money or his success, there is something a little painful for me about it, something that has to do not with him but with me, something about a sense of insufficiency rooted in outdated but still present pathologies. And this Mr. Facebook to whom The Social Network seems to be dedicated, young and rich with his casual clothes and an “I don’t need college but I had fun there anyway” bildungsroman all his own, is probably more than I could handle for the length of a movie.
But if it is strange that, in a moment in which this The Social Network is out and in many ways the talk of the critical town, I would be compelled to write in defense of Facebook in spite of my refusal to see it, it is perhaps stranger still because in this moment I am, for reasons to which I alluded in a piece published on this website some weeks ago (see: “Transmedia Missionaris”), in the process of phasing Facebook much, if not all of the way, out of my own life. Ironies abound: a “friend” request from the founder and editor-in-chief of the publishing project of which this website represents only one outlet remains pending on my Facebook account, not because of any resistance on my part to mixing business and pleasure –besides, who could say which was which, in the case, or if either was either? – but because I am reluctant to take on any new friends at all. The reason for this phasing out is that I’m tired of doing labor – minimal creative labor in the form of things like witty or beguiling comments on others’ comments on others’ Facebook status updates and so on – for a corporation that pays me no dividends (and is just putting more money into the pocket of the Zuckerman-Andrew monster), and I’m tired of my meager social existence, trite interactions with friends, pseudo-friends, and affectionately remembered acquaintances whose faces and bodies I have not encountered in months or years being converted into value-producing labor by the same. I’m fighting, I concede, a losing battle. Late capitalism’s machinery of commodification is irrepressible. Adorno’s dream of creating something, even a mere thought, that could not in one way or another be sold or exchanged, is probably no longer attainable, even in the deepest recesses of our psyches and the darkest, dankest corners of our publicly-funded university libraries. But I suppose my anti-hegemonic side is coming out, nonetheless. Just too much Facebook. If I can’t keep the profits from my commodified existence for myself, I might as well do what I can to spread the wealth just a little bit. Mostly, therefore, I’ve been continuing to use Facebook only as a means of redirection. If you are reading these lines, you may well have been directed to them by way of Facebook (and, as a result, directed away from Facebook: aha!).
All that being said, however, what I want to leave you with here are a few notes if not in defense of Facebook as such, then at the very least against a pair of anti-Facebook arguments I have had occasion to come across recently. I encountered the first of those arguments by way of the Huffington Post, faithful clearing house for left-leaning smut, which some weeks back posted an article detailing a recent purportedly scientific study of Facebook users in which it was discovered that the social networking phenomenon to end all social networking phenomena seems to provide a kind of refuge for people who might best be described as “shy narcissists” – or, to put it in more pedestrian terms, people who would be show-offs in the real world of face-to-face encounters if they just weren’t so shy when they got around other people. In Facebook-land, as it turns out, ironically protected from precisely the sort of face-to-face encounters that trigger their timidity, these shy narcissists go relatively wild, engaging in a disproportionate quantity, compared to their peers (even the narcissistic ones without shyness issues), of what the scientists describe as “self-promotion,” and what I would probably describe, more straightforwardly, as showing off: posting “My Celebrity Look-alikes” and the use of “photo enhancement” are the two examples given in the article. So what, in sum, are we to conclude from this perhaps not surprising information? I don’t know what the author’s of the study themselves concluded. I do know, however, what the anonymous author of the HuffPost’s article about the study, as though on behalf of the study, offered as a conclusion: Namely, that “a person’s Facebook profile does not necessarily provide an accurate representation of the person creating the page.”
First of all, no shit. Second of all, one simply cannot draw such a conclusion based on what this purportedly scientific study purports to have discovered. For one thing, to so much as imply the possibility of distinguishing between more and less “accurate” representations obviates – I don’t know – most if not all of the work of literary and aesthetic theory and criticism from the second half of the twentieth century. But even if were possible to make such distinctions, then it might very well turn out that the personality – that is, representation of self – one shows on Facebook is in fact more accurate than its real world counterpart. After all, in so far as any social interaction – any interaction in which a person, intentionally or otherwise, represents himself to others – will take place by way of one form of language or another, one code or system of communication or another and more than likely a whole network of such codes and systems, all overlapping and intertwining, one might say that personality, as a means of representing oneself to others, is in essence, and by nature, mediated. And in that case, the more mediated personality might just be, upside down though this may seem, the more highly developed, and by extension the more accurate.
The second objection against which I find myself compelled, in spite of my own movement away, to defend Facebook, comes from a magazine column, published this Sunday, the 3rd of October, by almost surely soon-to-be Nobel Prize winning Spanish writer Javier Marías. Though he is, I must concede, a writer whose novelistic work I admire to no end, there tends to be something a little retrograde about his weekly columns – something a bit more than charmingly anachronistic, given his aggressive polemicism – and this week’s “Red de pardillos,” or “Network of Idiots,” was no exception. Beginning with a nod to the dialectical structure of someone like J.D. Salinger’s militantly guarded privacy – the more he tried to hide, Marías points out, the more interested the world became in finding out whatever it was that he was hiding, even if it was nothing more than his own unremarkably aging face – Marías laments a generalized attraction, in particular on the part of people younger than he is, to the fleeting and probably illusory moments of fame offered by Facebook and its kin (Twitter is Marías’ other example). With attention to recent cases in Germany of employers firing employees on the grounds of information gleaned from their supposedly private Facebook accounts, Marías decries the carelessness of those who, unlike him, never lived under a dictatorship. Lulled into complacency by the apparent freedoms of democracy, he writes, they – or, I should say, we – have lost what he calls an “instinto de conservación,” or “instinct for self-preservation,” predicated on the knowledge that anything you say (as the Miranda Rights Marías later invokes remind us) can be used against you, that leads one to be guarded in the things he reveals about himself to others. The problem, as Marías sees it, is that the democracies of late capitalism are becoming increasingly similar to the totalitarianisms of modernity, and so in reality we need to protect ourselves as much as ever from having our secrets used against us.
There are two major problems, as I see it, with the inimitable Marías’ anti-Facebook argument. To begin with Marías, whose philosopher father Julián was harangued into exile at one point by the Franco regime, seems to conflate the old fascist totalitarianisms, such as Spain’s, with a new, “postmodern” – read: late, global capitalist – mode of totalizing power that is surely as different as it is hauntingly similar to its ultimately failed predecessors. It was Foucault who, late 1970s and early 80s, brought us the bad news that the story of how history reached the end of modernity was one that traced the slow internalization of the once external forms of surveillance with which Marías appears primarily concerned. About 1990, meanwhile, Fredric Jameson delivered the no less disaffecting report that late capitalism entails the colonization by capital, and that irrepressible machinery of commodification, of the last remaining “precapitalist enclaves,” as he described them – not just “Nature” and so-called un- or underdeveloped societies, but as well what my real-life acquaintance Benjamin Kunkel called, in a review of one of Jameson’s latest tomes, “the old family-haunted unconscious.” Were they right? Suffice it to say that in the time to which they spoke – that is to say, our time – the question seems to have less to do with whether we can (or even want to) guard the secrets from which our private selves are constituted from whatever great powers would use them to their advantage or (and) our detriment, than it is whether it is even meaningful to speak of such secrets (or such selves) in the first place.
In a way, the second problem I find with Marías’ arguments against Facebook and its kin answers to the first. It is curious, I think, that though Marías is so sensitive to the dialectical structure of privacy, which he elaborates with great perspicacity in regards to the case of the tiresomely insular (but R.I.P. all the same) Salinger, he seems to forget, overlook, or perhaps altogether ignore that there is a dialectic of revelation, as well. From the trivial to the sensationally lascivious, every revelation is in itself also the line that separates it from what has not been revealed in it. I, who am writing these lines, cannot tell you anything about myself, as I indeed have told you a few things about myself (and my “family-haunted unconscious,” moreover), without, at one and the same time, letting you know that there is something else – something more, beyond the spoken – that I have not told you yet. Perhaps, then, in Facebook and the many related phenomena it has hegemonically come to designate, what we are witnessing is not the burying of Marías’ “instinct for self-preservation” beneath an avalanche of pent-up narcissism at last (and orgasmically) massaged by mediation into release, but rather that very same instinct for self-preservation, guarding the very possibility of guarding its secrets and mysteries precisely – if paradoxically – by insisting, with every new status update (“Eli is the rain in Maine,” “Eli is mañana España,” “Eli is tune in or drop out,” “Eli is in Amherst, MA without a car,” “Eli is married”), that they still exist.
great post thanks